Tech Central: Atlassian’s Scott Farquhar shares plan for timber tower
Tech billionaire Scott Farquhar says more should be done to help technology innovation in Australia, and he plans a revolutionary building near Central Station to make it happen.
NSW
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Aussie tech billionaire Scott Farquhar wants to create a nation-building technology precinct in the world’s tallest timber skyscraper at Central Station to become Australia’s equivalent of Silicon Valley.
Plans have already been drawn up for the 40-storey timber building with a glass and steel facade and now Atlassian co-founder Mr Farquhar has revealed how he wants it to become a magnet for technology innovators.
“Someone graduating high school who wants to be a doctor, they go to a hospital but the biggest industry in the world is technology and there’s no real epicentre for that in Australia,” he said.
The timber tower will create 2500 jobs during construction and upon completion in 2025 will house 4000 Atlassian employees. Mr Farquhar wants it to “raise the tide of all of Australia’s technology industry, not just Atlassian”.
The NSW government has agreed to subsidise 50,000sq m of space for hi-tech start-ups to work in the building alongside their pioneering peers.
“We want to create a real precinct and a hub where people share information,’’ Mr Farquhar said.
“They meet in the coffee shop at the bottom of the building and initiate those practises between us.”
Mr Farquhar is putting his money where his heart is.
His own private investment company, Skip Capital, run by his wife, Kim, has pumped money into local companies such as Sydney-based online graphic design platform Canva and Harrison AI, which employs artificial intelligence to read X-rays.
Mr Farquhar says this is “not replacing radiologists” but changing the way they work, freeing them up to focus on human issues such as treatment plans.
“Even the legal profession is augmenting themselves with technology. Legal discovery was an area where people pored over millions of pages of contracts to find one little thing that they could use in a lawsuit. Now it’s all being done by computers. That’s what you will see in the future — computers augmenting people.”
These are the jobs of the future destined for a place in the Atlassian tower.
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